Topical Tropes

These are what we call the 'YMMV items.' Things that some people find in this work. We call them 'your mileage might vary' because not everyone sees these things in the same way. This starts discussions in the trope lists, a thing we don't want. Please use the discussion page if you'd like to discuss any of these items.

Complete Monster: Diogenes Pendergast in the Dance of Death and Book of the Dead is a massive monster, and considering what happened to him as a child doesn't excuse his horrific actions. Through the course of two books he kills numerous close friends of his brother while taunting him about it and doing it to set him up for life in prison, enacts the same procedure that drove him insane on some unlucky souls as a test run before enacting the real thing on thousands of people at once, drugs up one of the oldest friends of Pendergast and D'Agosta after failing to kill her once so she's left in a death-like state and he can return to properly kill her whenever he wants, and tries to completely shatter the mental state of his brother's ward in order to get her to commit suicide simply For the Evulz. The fact that even before his proper introduction in the books his mere mention is enough to completely unnerve his usually very calm brother truly speaks volumes of how dangerous this man is.

Ending Fatigue: The conclusion to Book of the Dead is hit with a bit of this. Even after the climax has happened, there's still nearly a hundred pages devoted to Constance hunting Diogenes across the globe.

God-Mode Sue - Pendergast is so competent it gets a bit ridiculous at times.

Though this gets subverted from Fever Dream onwards.

Homage: Pendergast is a much more sociable - and American - version of Sherlock Holmes. For example, he talks to D'Agosta in a 'My dear Vincent' fashion, uses the 'elementary' comment, and of course employs Sherlock Scans. This hits its apex in White Fire where part of the plot involves a long-lost Holmes story and includes several references to the original books.

Ho Yay - Pendergast and D'Agosta have made more than one reader wonder.

Like You Would Really Do It: Let's face it: did anyone really think that they would just kill off Pendergast at the very beginning of Cold Vengeance?

TV Tropes is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy